It’s been nearly two years since Hickenlooper began his strip tease for a presidential run in 2020, and so far, he’s managed to remove a glove.

Our search of Google news using the terms Hickenlooper, president and 2020 resulted in 4,350 hits — thousands of stories written about a man thinking of running for office — give or take the hundred or so of Ohio Gov. John Kasich denying the rumors of their potential running team.

“Look, ‘Kasich-Hickenlooper,’ first of all, you couldn’t pronounce it and second of all, you couldn’t fit it on a bumper sticker,” Kasich said on Sunday’s “Meet The Press.”

The earliest speculation we could find of Hickenlooper dangling his name in the wind was in Westwordon Jan. 26, 2017.

So perhaps we should blame them for starting the trend.

The thousands of stories continued throughout this year, and we see more this week — all about a man thinking about doing something.

We’ve been thinking about taking down the Christmas lights we strung up on the roof in 2015, where are our headlines?

We’ll spare you all the predictions made in these stories, mostly by unnamed Democratic sources whose initials are J.H., and give you our own prediction:

Hickenlooper will continue his strip tease until he is safely out of the governor’s mansion. By then, it will be too late for reporters to pester him with questions about his actual accomplishments as governor for the past eight years — two of which were spent not running for president.